Tamberla Perry, Geoffrey Owens, Marc Grapey, Patrick Clear/Photo: Eric Y. Exit

RECOMMENDED

When David Mamet was on Charlie Rose promoting the New York premiere of his new play “Race” last year, he was naturally enough asked what he thought of President Obama. “I would rather not answer that question,” he said after a long silence, “as it might influence how people approach this play.” Since then, Mamet has released his infamous liberal-to-conservative manifesto, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” a kind of upside-down Augustine’s “Confessions” where he describes Obama’s “Change” that was so “accepted by a drugged populace and a supine press” as “the unfortunate descent of a productive nation into socialism” where “racial tensions have devolved to acrimony unknown in this country for decades.” Of Obama’s declaration that “Selma belongs to me, too,” Mamet assesses, “but the credit does not.”

No wonder in promoting the Chicago premiere of “Race” that Goodman Theatre, Mamet’s old stomping ground, has by and large turned the production over to its African-American director Chuck Smith. Also no wonder that, while Goodman’s gift shop had plenty of copies of “Race” on hand and virtually any other Mamet play for sale during intermission opening night as well as his book of theater essays, “The Secret Knowledge,” Mamet’s latest and most controversial opus, was nowhere to be found. Read the rest of this entry »

Darren Criss (#4) with Team StarKid

With our criteria shifted back to artistic accomplishment in theater, dance, comedy and opera this year, our task got infinitely tougher. Because while the number of performing venues grows at a steady rate, the increase in the number of noteworthy artists seems to grow exponentially. For everyone we name on the list below, we had to leave off five, an embarrassment of riches for Chicago. We made a conscious effort to introduce a meaningful number of new faces to the list this year; the necessary absences should not be construed as a loss of worthiness as a consequence. We often find trends when we do the research these lists require; this year we’re starting to see a more meaningful effort to redefine performance itself in the internet age, from the runaway success of StarKids, to the more calculated endeavors of Silk Road. So what defines a “player”? Consider it some complex stew of career achievement, recent “heat” and, in some cases, rising stardom.

Written by Zach Freeman, Brian Hieggelke, Sharon Hoyer and Dennis Polkow

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Steve Scott and Karen Janes Woditsch/Photo: Eric Y. Exit

By Rachel Helene Swift

This week, Ebenezer Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, and Tiny Tim took the stage in the Goodman Theatre’s thirty-fourth annual production of “A Christmas Carol.” Veteran director Steve Scott, who last presented the show in 1992, reimagines Charles Dickens’ classic story with new special effects, music and choreography. We recently caught up with Scott, who also serves as the Goodman Theatre’s associate producer and has directed nearly 200 plays in Chicago.

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Edward Gero/Photo: Liz Lauren

John Logan’s play is intentionally tricky: it both valorizes and occasionally gently undermines our hyperbolic image of the artist as a visionary, rebel, philosopher and spiritual guide all in one. For no period in recent art history has this stereotype been more reified than in abstract-expressionism, where the personalities of artists like Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko were fetishized through creation myths fueled by their hyper-subjective creative work. And Logan plays right into the urge to personify the emotional intensity of the ab-ex canvas by presenting us with a larger-than-life Mark Rothko, nee Marcus Rothkowitz, who faces in the play the difficult decision of whether to sell out—literally—a set of exquisite color-field paintings commissioned by a fancy restaurant. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Eric Y. Exit

RECOMMENDED

Not long after Ted Fishman wrote the book “China, Inc.,” I accompanied him on a trip to Shanghai, where he was to deliver a series of talks to American business leaders eager to gain access to this mysterious land of unprecedented opportunity. Shortly after landing at Pudong International Airport, I found myself not only caught up in the exotic excitement inherent in cultural tourism, but also succumbing to the infectious fever of capitalism raging in what seemed to be its rawest native state here in the cradle of Communism. Before long I was conjuring up ways that I too might strike gold in this frontier of fortune. Not till I got back home did I come to my senses and realize, as intoxicating as it all was, that in spite of the trappings of American capitalism—the shiny skyscrapers, the epic billboards, the smoggy traffic jams—China is a country that plays by very different rules. Not only are the practices of law regarding rights, contracts and justice bent wildly out of our frame, but very basic social customs are irreconcilably foreign and not especially hospitable to outsiders seeking a piece of this economic miracle.

David Henry Hwang’s “Chinglish,” now in its world-premiere production at the Goodman Theatre, explores these nuances through the prism of communication. Chinglish is the mangled-in-translation Chinese version of English, most famously manifest in public signs, and Hwang’s play finds no shortage of uproarious humor in such; in fact, his American character Daniel Cavanaugh is a manufacturing executive from Cleveland hoping to restore his family’s fortune by making the signs for the city of Guiyang’s new cultural center. As the American child of a Chinese immigrant, Hwang has the benefit of dual insight; he knows that the jokes play on both sides, and through translated Mandarin, we see the idiotic things being articulated by Daniel as he tries to grab hold of a language where a word means very different things based on subtle variations of tonality in pronunciation. Though “lost in translation” is not an especially new idea—virtually any “foreign” culture is going to offer up its own peculiarities—it seems to offer up an endless supply of laughs here nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

By Dennis Polkow

Although his diverse career spans more than thirty years and has encompassed television, movies, performance art, opera and musicals, 53-year old playwright and Los Angeles native David Henry Hwang is best known for his 1988 Tony Award-winning Broadway play “M. Butterfly” and as the preeminent voice of the Asian-American experience. His words both on and off the page tend to attract controversy, including his role in the protest of the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian in “Miss Saigon.” That incident sparked his 1993 play “Face Value” which closed on Broadway before it was out of previews, but was somewhat reincarnated as the successful 2007 “Yellow Face,” a play which is receiving its Chicago premiere by the Silk Road Theatre Project this summer—where Hwang has collaborated previously—along with two other Hwang works: the world premiere of “Chinglish” at Goodman Theatre, and the first revival in two decades of an early work from 1981, “Family Devotions” at Halcyon Theatre. On a lunch break from “Chinglish” rehearsals at Goodman Theatre, which has reunited Hwang with his collaborator on the book for Elton John and Tim Rice’s “Aida,” Robert Falls, we walked around the downtown theater district discussing these works and what inspired them before landing at a sandwich shop. We would likely still be there if an SOS hadn’t been sent out that he was needed back for a run-through.

Why did you want to have the world premiere of “Chinglish” in Chicago?
I always wanted to have more of a presence here. It’s arguably the most vital theater town in the country in terms of energy and people doing things for good and the right reasons. I got to know the community and the community got to know me through my working with Silk Road [Theatre Project] on a couple of projects. When I wrote “Chinglish” and finished it off, I thought, “Where do I want to start this show? And I thought, “This is a play that could really work in Chicago.” So I sent it to Bob [Falls] and he was immediately responsive. He read it really quickly and committed to doing it. I finished the first draft in January of 2010, and I sent it to him in February, so it all happened pretty quick. Malik [Gillani] and Jamil [Khoury] were already planning to do “Yellow Face” at Silk Road this season anyway, and I think the decision was made to have them happen at roughly the same time. And then Halcyon came in and decided to do “Family Devotions” this summer too, so that’s kind of how it all came together. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark L. Montgomery and Jenny Bacon/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

There are few nights more exciting than a world premiere by a leading playwright when the work lives up to its excitement. In a certain way, the audience feels pride of discovery, like we’ve pointed out the future Mozart in the Salzburg maternity ward or something. The opening of “Stage Kiss” was one of those nights, as the talents of Sarah Ruhl are in their finest flourish in a pitch-perfect production at Goodman Theatre.

It takes a certain kind of hubris to mess around with Noel Coward, especially “Private Lives,” but in this farcical comedy of manners, Ruhl reworks major bits of it in a funhouse-mirror sort of way, mixing heavy plot similarities with bits and pieces of theater’s most familiar devices, whether it be the play within the play, the musical as the perfect expression of romance or even talentless eye candy being cast upwards by the (implicit) romantic crush of the director. It’s one thing to mash up theatricalities, but another altogether to write dialogue that sings with as much crafty wit as Coward, and this Ruhl does. For you need know little about what she’s making fun of to have great fun with this work. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Eric Y. Exit

RECOMMENDED

The United States’ long-troubled relationship with its southern border state tends to paint much of our perception of Mexico in simple black-and-white tones. Tanya Saracho’s reworking of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” as “El Nogalar” (The Pecan Orchard) crafts a more complex and colorful picture of a nation not only in a constant struggle to come to terms with its neighbor to the north, for sure, but also with its own troubled past and present. A clever idea, this, taking such a familiar work, so European in its themes of class and family, and setting it in Latin America where European colonizers long ago exported their notions of landed gentry, class discrimination and violent conquest.

The matriarch, Maité (played with vivacious abandon by Charín Alvarez), has returned from a self-imposed exile, along with her Americanized younger daughter Anita (energetically played by Christina Nieves), to her family’s ancestral home in northern Mexico, where her older daughter Valeria (earnestly played by Sandra Delgado) wages a losing battle to hold on in the face of an evaporating fortune and, more ominously, the violent threats of the Mexican “mafia.” Saracho’s innovations here,  in a crackling and funny script augmented by the creative direction of Cecilie D. Keenan, include a clever way of blending English, Spanish, Spanglish and Espanglés that in itself hints at the complexity of modern Mexican life. And Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set, an exquisite dollhouse in an orchard, establishes the unreal fantasy of the family’s notion of its place in the world before a word is spoken. Read the rest of this entry »

Keith Kupferer, David Pasquesi, Beth Lacke and Mary Beth Fisher/Photo: Eric Y. Exit

RECOMMENDED

There isn’t much to say about Goodman’s production of Yasmina Reza’s Tony Award-winning new play, “God of Carnage,” other than it’s perfect. The play itself, from the creator of one of the most financially and critically successful shows of our time, “Art,” confirms that the French writer is a master of the contemporary upper-middle-class comedy of manners. Two couples meet to civilly discuss their children, one of whom smacked the other’s son in the mouth, knocking out teeth. A briskly hilarious seventy minutes later,  everything’s unwound, alliances have been broken and reassembled several times over and playground violence is the least of anyone’s problems. “Carnage” manages to carefully place layers of critique beneath the surface of crackling wit and raucous physical comedy, especially in sending up the four characters and the “types” they represent—an obnoxious corporate lawyer Alan (played as a lovable weasel by David Pasquesi), his Barbie of a wife Annette (Beth Lacke, a porcelain doll ready to crack and expel its innards), the self-made man of the world Michael (played with a masterful blend of sensitivity and gruffness by David Kupferer) who hides an ugly inner life for the sake of harmony in his marriage to the protagonist of the piece, Veronica the writer (played with just the right manic earnestness by Mary Beth Fisher), who may just be the most unhinged of all. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Jaeck, Alex Weisman, Eddie Bennett, Barbara Garrick, Myra Lucretia Taylor/Photo: Liz Lauren

RECOMMENDED

It took me a while to decide if I loved or hated Thomas Bradshaw’s “Mary,” in its world-premiere production at the Goodman Theatre. I decided on the former, in large part because of the very fact that it created this quandary for me—I like plays that provoke—but if you go with the latter, I won’t argue with you. It is, I suspect, that polarizing. Plato must be spinning in his cave.

On its surface, it’s a whimsical campy sendup of racism and homophobia, set mostly in the about-to-be-AIDS-plagued eighties, when a Wham!-loving young music student brings his flamboyant boyfriend home to meet his clueless parents who live on the remnants of a plantation that’s been in the family since long before “The War of Northern Aggression” and retain, to an absurd degree, a racial attitude circa 1835. Mary is the family’s virtual house slave, an illiterate, content and virtually uncompensated servant cut from the “mammy” mold. Take this ludicrous situation, and add in penis enlargers, Cabbage Patch dolls and a disco-fied dance scene—yes, they vogue to Madonna—and you’ll start to wonder why you’re not catching this show in the back room of a Boys Town club. It won’t be long, right, before racism and homophobia give way to one big we-are-the-world family, as if Charles Busch made an after-school special.

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